Darn it, Froghorn! Does it have to be you?
She had thought she might just be in the clear, that perhaps she had escaped undetected.
There was no point running, certainly not while she was wearing the Superskin – so perfect for swimming, but useless for sprinting. So she got to her feet and trudged up the beach to face what was no doubt going to be a very uncomfortable barrage of righteousness.
But as she got closer she saw she was mistaken: not Froghorn but …
‘Clancy?’ she said.
‘HEY RUBE,’ SAID CLANCY. He sounded cold, his teeth chattering.
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.
‘Waiting for you.’ He shivered.
‘But how did you know I would be here?’
He shrugged. ‘A hunch, I guess. You did say you would be coming back and I tried to phone you a few times earlier and when you didn’t pick up I sort of supposed you would be swimming out to Meteor Island. I mean what else would you be doing at 5am?’
They rode their bikes back along the coast road and stopped in at Green-Wood House, so Ruby could change and pick up her school books. It was still early and the household was not yet awake, so the two of them slipped back out and made their way to the diner on Amster. Ruby ordered a double breakfast and Clancy listened while she described all that had happened.
And finally she told him of her mistake at having imagined Hitch could have been a junior recruit.
‘I think I might have offended him,’ said Ruby.
‘How?’ asked Clancy.
‘He asked me how old I thought he was.’
‘What did you say?’
‘Fifty-two.’
‘If you said that to my mom,’ said Clancy, ‘she would have you on double chores for the rest of the decade.’
School dragged a bit but it couldn’t be helped. Had she skipped another day’s schooling, Mrs Drisco would be well and truly on the warpath – it was becoming a challenge to think up reasonable excuses.
When the bell clanged, Ruby knew exactly where she was headed.
She found the City Library busy, but she bagged a place at one of the smaller tables towards the back of the hall. Dumping her coat, she walked up the steps to the newspaper archive room and started to go through the store of local news microfiche.
What she knew now was that Walter and Duke were right: there was a secret space base somewhere in the Sequoia Mountains and not so far from Little Mountain Side. She also knew that Bradley Baker had been flying there in some kind of space craft when he got shot down.
What she wanted to know was: had his crash been reported in the local news?
She had a pretty good idea of what she was looking for and a pretty good idea of what she was expecting to find.
However, after a few hours of peering through the microfiche viewer at archived newspaper reports Ruby had come up with absolutely nothing regarding a western mountain plane crash in the fall of 1962.
There was no mention of it in the national papers, but perhaps she shouldn’t be surprised – a small aircraft crashing would hardly be of great interest to the nation at large, especially since the guy piloting the plane was no one of note. To the wider world Bradley Baker was a nobody.
Ruby didn’t give up there, instead she began working her way through the local papers, the West Mountain Tribune and the Ridgepoint Gazette. In this second paper she found a report of a bright light followed by a thunderous noise somewhere just off the mountain road known as the Pine Forest Pass. A small area of woodland had been destroyed and a crater formed, but nothing else: no debris, no human remains. There was speculation as to whether the cause was a meteorite re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere.
Only one newspaper, the Sequoia Herald, raised the possibility of a plane or other aircraft exploding mid-air, though this idea was quickly rejected by one witness:
‘if it was a plane then it must have vaporised, as there was no sign of any wreckage whatsoever.’
The witness was a member of the Sequoia Mountain forestry team and though he had not been present on the night of the explosion, he did visit the site the following day and found nothing to lead him to believe that the cause of the explosion could have been an aircraft. All the local articles reported pretty much the same inconclusive findings, with no explanation or useful detail.
However, things got a little more interesting and a little weirder when Ruby picked up Little Mountain Side’s UFO quarterly journal, titled Unidentified. It was an amateur publication, put together by enthusiastic UFO watchers.
Most of the magazine was taken up with blurry photographs of bright lights in the sky, which, due to the poor quality of the images, could be anything from helicopters to streetlights. There were also articles about little green men, things that went bump in the night and alien encounters, but it was when Ruby turned to page seventeen and found the interview with local man Lenny Rivers that her interest was piqued.
Lenny had been driving back home along Pine Forest Pass in the direction of Ridgepoint when he had spotted an injured man lying on the tarmac.
‘a hit and run, probably a logging truck I reckon, poor soul had been left for dead. I half-lifted, half-dragged the fella, and eventually got him into my truck with the intention of driving him on to Ridgepoint hospital, they got a pretty well-equipped emergency unit there. I hadn’t gone more than a quarter-mile when I find the road cordoned off, diversion it says, maybe a fallen tree I’m thinking, but I’m in my truck, got my chainsaw with me, and I figure I can deal with that, and heck I don’t have much choice here, the guy’s dying, I gotta get him some medical attention and quick. I don’t have the time to drive fifty miles in the other direction.’
It was en route to Ridgepoint that Mr Rivers witnessed his second dramatic happening of the night:
‘It was 1am or thereabouts and pitch dark and then all of a sudden I start to see lights in the trees, all these flashlights and something glowing. Then I begin to make out figures; as I got nearer it was possible to see that these figures were official-looking fellows, black suits, that kind of caper, and all talking on walkie-talkie devices – like FBI agents maybe. I slowed down to ask if they might be able to give my passenger some medical help, but I was waved back, quicker than you can spit, told me the road was closed, like they couldn’t get me outta there fast enough. Had to find another route to the hospital which lord knows wasn’t easy.’ Mr Rivers drove out there the next morning, but found, ‘there wasn’t a darned thing to see other than a pretty big dent in the ground.’
When Unidentified asked Mr Rivers what he believed was the cause of all this ‘official’ attention, he said:
‘Folks in town were talking about a meteorite, but if you want to know what I think, it was a UFO, some kinda spaceship had come down.’
Ruby sat back in her chair. Lenny Rivers wasn’t wrong. A meteorite wouldn’t have FBI-types closing off roads. If it had been a plane that had crashed, a regular plane, there would have been no reason to keep it hush-hush.
A spaceship full of Martians? Hard to believe.
A space craft, not alien but part of the Spectrum Space Programme? Possibly.
When Ruby had finished reading every single article, paragraph and sentence relating to the Pine Forest Pass incident, she sat back in her chair and wondered what might be her next move.
Go find Lenny Rivers, she thought.
Finding Lenny Rivers’ address was the easy part; he was in the phone book.
No time like right now, she thought, as she picked up her satchel and headed off towards the bus depot.
When Ruby arrived at Lenny Rivers’ house, the door was answered by an elderly woman.
‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ said Ruby, ‘but I was wondering if I could speak to Mr Lenny Rivers?’
The woman looked puzzled. ‘My husband passed on eight years ago now.’
‘Oh,’ said Ruby. ‘I didn’t know, I mean I wasn’t thinking … geez, I’m sorry.’
&
nbsp; ‘Quite all right, dear,’ said the woman. ‘Is there something I can help you with?’
‘Maybe,’ said Ruby. ‘That is, if you don’t mind.’
Once Ruby had properly introduced herself and explained what had brought her to Ridgepoint, and more specifically, why she was standing there on the stoop, they went inside. ‘If it’s unidentified flying objects you’re looking to discuss then I’ll be needing tea – you want a cup?’
Dora Rivers was a nice woman – in her eighties now, but still what Mrs Digby would describe as ‘with it’ in the brain department.
‘Oh, Lenny was pretty convinced about those UFOs. Every once in a while he would spot one – or at least imagine he had.’
‘You don’t believe in them?’ asked Ruby.
‘I’ve seen some weird things, believe me,’ said Dora, ‘but my view is, there’s always a reasonable explanation for everything. A bright light in the sky doesn’t make it a flying saucer.’
‘What about the weird activity Lenny saw in the fall of 1962? Do you know anything about that?’
Dora scratched her head. ‘As I recall it, Lenny was always seeing weird things.’
‘This was probably weirder than most,’ said Ruby. She opened her satchel and took out the copy she had made of the Unidentified article. ‘It was out at Pine Forest Pass,’ she said. She handed the piece to Dora, who reached for her glasses and looked at it a while.
‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘I do remember this one, I remember it very well, because Lenny came home all animated. It was late, maybe 3am.’
‘So what did he tell you?’ asked Ruby.
‘He told me he had found a fella on the road, knocked down by a truck and left for dead.’
‘Yeah, but what did he say about the UFO?’ asked Ruby.
‘Oh, he was very exercised about that, all these men in black suits he said, all on walkie-talkies. He was very suspicious, thought they were the FBI.’
‘Was he right?’ asked Ruby.
Dora shrugged. ‘How to know? No one was interested in Lenny’s theories, I’m afraid me included. I was much more concerned about the poor soul he took to Ridgepoint Hospital. Lenny didn’t expect him to see the night through.’
‘But he did?’ asked Ruby.
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Rivers, ‘confounded all the doctors.’ She paused, musing on the memory. ‘Then the fellow disappeared into thin air. According to what the nurse said, he was there one minute and gone the next, never seen again. Of course, that made Lenny think that perhaps the fella was actually some sort of Martian and he’d been beamed back up into his spaceship.’ She began to laugh at that.
Ruby smiled. ‘But the FBI guys, or at least the men Lenny took for FBI guys, did they ever come back?’ she asked.
‘No,’ said Mrs Rivers.
‘And the explosion,’ asked Ruby, ‘I mean did your husband ever change his mind about that, ever think that maybe it was something other than a UFO?’
Mrs Rivers shook her head. ‘He was sure as eggs that something fishy was going on. He said, if it was a meteorite then why the fuss? If it was a plane crash then it was some special sort of plane because they cleared that crash site pretty good and quick.’
Ruby sighed. It was all interesting stuff, but this conversation wasn’t taking her anywhere she hadn’t already been.
‘Say,’ said Dora, getting to her feet, ‘why don’t you take this with you?’ She went over to the desk by the fireplace and opened a drawer – out of it she pulled a little beige notebook.
‘It’s Lenny’s UFO sightings diary. He wrote up every weird and peculiar happening in that book, a kinda hobby of his.’ She handed it to Ruby. ‘You’ve got more use for it than I have,’ she said. ‘That I can promise you.’
Ruby began reading as soon as she got on the bus back to Twinford.
Lenny’s account was pretty detailed. There was a good description of the lights in the forest, the men standing around as if guarding the site. He had also made a note of everything the dying man had said to him; he had wanted to remember in case he could be of help when the family came to find him or, more likely, to claim his body. Lenny had written:
The fella was talking about himself as if he had already passed, like he knew he was going to die. It was the way he answered when I asked him his name, he said:
‘Loveday, it was Morgan … Loveday.’
Ruby stared intently at those four lines.
Could it be a coincidence that both these names were echoed in the Ghost Files?
That would be a pretty big coincidence: a kid named Casey Morgan, a kid named Loveday, and a disappearing man named Morgan Loveday – all three connected to strange events. The name of the suspected would-be assassin merged with the name of the rescuer, making another name for a man who appeared from nowhere and disappeared to nowhere.
What if the injured man had not been the victim of a hit and run, what if the injured guy had fallen from the sky and crawled from the wreckage of his aircraft? What if his aircraft had been no ordinary plane or helicopter, but was some kind of space craft connected to the Spectrum Space Programme?
What if the whole thing about the meteorite had been made up and fed to the local newspapers, a cover up? What if the men in black suits were cleaning up the site so no one would be any the wiser about this space activity?
Ruby mumbled the words the injured guy had spoken to Lenny Rivers:
‘Loveday, it was Morgan Loveday.’
She repeated them over and over, altering the stress, so that the words became a message. Loveday, it was Morgan. Loveday?
What if this guy had not been telling Lenny Rivers his name but actually had been trying to tell him something else like, tell Loveday it was Morgan?
Loveday, the kid on the river bank, the kid who had saved Baker’s life when he was a boy recruit.
Morgan, the kid who had tried to take his life.
What if the man on the road was telling this kid from way back that Morgan was responsible for his near-drowning, a throw-back memory, all confused from a blow to the head.
Or …
What if he had kept in touch with Loveday and he was telling the only person left on this planet who actually remembered what had happened all those years before, that Morgan had come back and he was the one responsible for the explosion?
If that was true then there was only one reasonable conclusion. It seemed more than unlikely, it seemed verging on crazy, but not impossible and, as Sherlock Holmes once said: ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’
Everything seemed to be pointing to the fact that the pilot of this craft, the man Lenny Rivers had rescued, must be Bradley Baker.
‘I want somebody dead,’
said Casey Morgan …
… The Count shrugged. ‘Don’t we all.’
‘This is different, this boy—’
‘A boy!’
‘You’re not listening …’
The man flashed back a look of steel-cold loathing, pointing his finger so close to Casey Morgan’s face that the child stepped back. ‘What reason would I have for helping a wretch like you?’
Casey Morgan took a breath and said, ‘Because this is no ordinary boy, this boy is Bradley Baker. Take him down and take down Spectrum.’
HER PARENTS WERE SITTING WATCHING TV when she came home.
‘Hey honey, you’re back late,’ said her father.
‘Have you been at Clancy’s?’ asked Sabina.
‘The library,’ replied Ruby.
‘Rube, you study too hard,’ said her father.
‘Your father’s right,’ said her mother. ‘You got to start letting your hair down.’
‘You know what they say,’ said her father, ‘all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.’
‘Ruby a dull boy,’ corrected her mother.
‘Right,’ said Ruby, ‘I’ll bear that in mind.’
She went into the kitchen to fix herself a sna
ck. Bug was asleep under the table, but stirred from his slumbers when he sensed her presence. She scratched the dog behind his ears and pondered what she knew or thought she knew.
The question was, if Bradley Baker was alive then why had he not returned to Spectrum?
Because he thinks someone is trying to kill him?
No, this couldn’t be the reason. Baker might spend a few months lying low, trying to figure out who he could trust, but not a whole decade.
She needed someone to speak to about this. Not LB, that didn’t seem wise.
Blacker? She considered it and then dismissed the idea.
Hitch? Had to be.
She tapped a message into her Spectrum watch
NEED TO SPEAK TO YOU ASAP.
and waited for the message to be received.
It didn’t take more than seven seconds.
MONITORING A 678. UNLESS YOU’RE DANGLING BY A FINGER FROM THE SKYLARK BUILDING, I’LL HAVE TO CATCH UP WITH YOU LATER, KID.
‘What’s a 678 when it’s at home?’ muttered Ruby.
She reread the notes Rivers had made regarding this Morgan Loveday.
The doctors told me that apart from his name, he can’t seem to remember a darned thing about himself.
So what if his memory had never come back?
Ruby thought for a moment. Then why wouldn’t he seek help?
What would Clancy say? she wondered. She could almost hear her friend’s voice in her ear; he was saying:
Because Bradley Baker’s sixth sense is talking to him.
Because he has a hunch that it’s not safe to come back.
Because Casey Morgan is still out there.
When Ruby returned to her room, she found the message light on her answer machine was blinking. She flicked the playback button and listened.
Beep: ‘Hey Ruby, this is Red, I’m really sorry but something’s happened and well, kinda slightly, actually totally destroyed your guitar, you might not believe this but for once it wasn’t my fault, this time it was cos the ceiling collapsed in the kitchen – squashed it flat. Anyway, that’s not the point. I’m gonna replace it, but I’m gonna be saving for a while, you know, but hang in there, I got a Saturday job now. Sorry, call me OK, don’t be mad, I mean do be mad but I’m super sorry, so keep that in mind.’